LISFLOOD-FP 8.1: new GPU-accelerated solvers for faster fluvial/pluvial flood simulations

The local inertial two-dimensional (2D) flow model on LISFLOOD-FP, the so-called ACCeleration (ACC) uniform grid solver, has been widely used to support fast, computationally efficient fluvial/pluvial flood simulations. This paper describes new releases, on LISFLOOD-FP 8.1, for parallelised flood simulations on the graphical processing units (GPUs) to boost efficiency of the existing parallelised ACC solver on the central processing units (CPUs) and enhance it further by enabling a new non-uniform grid version. The non-uniform solver generates its grid using the multiresolution analysis (MRA) of the multiwavelets (MWs) to a Galerkin polynomial projection of the digital elevation model (DEM). This sensibly coarsens the resolutions where the local topographic details are below an error threshold e and allows classes of land use to be properly adapted. Both the grid generator and the adapted ACC solver on the non-uniform grid are implemented in a GPU new codebase, using the indexing of Z-order curves alongside a parallel tree traversal approach. The efficiency performance of the GPU parallelised uniform and non-uniform grid solvers is assessed for five case studies, where the accuracy of the latter is explored for e=10(-4) and 10(-3) in terms of how close it can reproduce the prediction of the former. On the GPU, the uniform ACC solver is found to be 2-28 times faster than the CPU predecessor with increased number of elements on the grid, and the non-uniform solver can further increase the speed up to 320 times with increased reduction in the grid's elements and decreased variability in the resolution. LISFLOOD-FP 8.1, therefore, allows faster flood inundation modelling to be performed at both urban and catchment scales. It is openly available under the GPL v3 license, with additional documentation at https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0 (last access: 12 March 2023).

Automated summary

This paper introduces new releases on LISFLOOD-FP 8.1 for parallel flood simulations. The parallelized ACC solver has been implemented on GPUs to improve computational efficiency and a new non-uniform grid version has been introduced. The non-uniform solver generates grids using multiresolution analysis and allows proper adaptation of land use. The GPU implementation of both uniform and non-uniform solvers shows significant speed improvements compared to the CPU predecessor.